The city is taking a closer look at parking issues in the Victorial Hill area.
When the Woodlands site was redeveloped into a master planned community, the plan was to emphasize "calming the streets" and "skinny streets" in Victoria Hill's road network. Since residents started moving into the Victoria Hill development a number of years ago, the city has received a number of complaints about the lack of visitor parking. Council recently directed staff to do a comprehensive study of the neighbourhood's parking situation, and the city hired Bunt and Associates to assess the on-street and off-street parking at Victoria Hill.
A staff report to council stated that the consultants reported that there is an adequate supply of on-and offstreet parking in Victoria Hill to accommodate the existing demand.
"There is, however, a significant difference in the parking occupancy between on-street visitor parking and off-street visitor parking, with considerably higher occupancy of on-street visitor parking spaces," said the report. "This indicates that there is a parking management rather than a parking supply problem in Victoria Hill."
The consultant recommended a number of short-term actions to take to manage the parking supply. If these recommendations are implemented and the parking problems persist, Bunt and Associates stated that the city could reassess the two-hour parking time limit in Victoria Hill or explore the construction of additional parking.
Coun. Betty McIntosh said the traffic study had some interesting findings, as it was determined the area had enough visitor parking but some of it was a little cumbersome to access. The city didn't have any minimum requirements in place regarding residential visitor parking before 2010, by which time several developments in Victoria Hill were built or in process.
